Vehicles are increasingly equipped with one or more information and entertainment devices capable of receiving signals or playing portable media. Examples of such devices are conventional radio receivers, satellite radio receivers, cassette tape players, and compact disc (CD) players. New formats and media, such as MP3 and Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs), are added to vehicles as they become popular. Gradually, the new technology devices replace the old.
Yet, there is no way for the manufacturer of the vehicle or information and entertainment devices to directly determine how and when the customers are using the devices, let alone parsing usage data to identify different user groups, as required to manage effective marketing and to make design decisions.
Customers can be surveyed individually regarding their usage with expensive live or email surveys, however, the compiled data may not be reliable. Customers often have difficulty accurately estimating their usage. The data is likely to be skewed because people who are excited about certain devices are more likely to be willing to take a survey than people who are not. In addition, the lag times and costs associated with survey data make market research an impractical tool for influencing marketing communications in the short term. For example, a satellite radio service provider giving free trial usage with the purchase of a vehicle would not be able to identify a customer with low usage and provide additional information to the customer before the trial period ends. Customers who use a satellite radio service early in the trial period are significantly more likely to renew the service, so failure to identify a low usage customer during the trial period often results in a lost subscription after the trial period.
Another problem from the lack of customer use data is marketing inefficiency. Heavy users of a particular information and entertainment device are likely to renew subscriptions associated with the device. Therefore, there is less need to contact the heavy user with direct communications, such as direct mail or outbound telemarketing. Direct communication targeted to heavy users results in unnecessary expense for the subscription provider and potential annoyance for the valued subscriber.
It would be desirable to have a method and system for monitoring and retrieving device usage from vehicles that overcomes the above disadvantages.